Forza Motorsport 5 and 6 Are Running on PC, and Xbox Had Nothing to Do With It

Forza Motorsport 5 has never officially been on PC, and neither has Motorsport 6 beyond a cut-down free version called Apex. As of this week, you can run both of them on one anyway, and it wasn’t Xbox that made it happen.

Azimuth is a fan-made project that runs the Xbox One versions of Forza games on PC. It got Forza Horizon 2 going earlier this month, which is the one I’ve played and it’s what the video above is. On the 26th of October, version 1.0 added Motorsport 5, Motorsport 6 and Horizon 3.

The project says they run up to 40% faster than before, at higher resolutions and frame rates than the consoles ever gave them, and even in HDR. There’s experimental support for steering wheels too.

What the catch is

There’s a few. It’s unofficial, and it doesn’t come with any games, so you need your own Xbox One game files. The games run offline, so there’s no multiplayer and no achievements. And I’m not going to tell you where to get it, so you won’t find a link here.

The bit that gets me is what these games are. Horizon 2, Horizon 3, Motorsport 5 and Motorsport 6 have all come off sale, so you can’t buy any of them from Xbox. Only Horizon 3 ever had a full PC release. Four games Microsoft won’t sell you are now running better than they ever did, and it was fans who did that.

What Xbox has said

About Azimuth, nothing that I can find. I couldn’t find any response from Microsoft or Playground Games as of today.

Xbox has noticed this kind of thing in general, though. On the 13th of October, Xbox boss Asha Sharma announced a new team called Xbox Labs, after seeing games decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never made for. The memo talks about “giving old games new life”. It also talks about being responsible stewards of IP, and it doesn’t name a single game, Forza or Azimuth.

So that’s a nice line, but nothing has come out of it yet. The thing is, running these games was never the hard part, as Azimuth has just shown. Selling them is, because the licences for the real cars and tracks run out. A fan project doesn’t have to worry about that. Microsoft does, and that’s why I wouldn’t expect it to be delighted with this for long.

I’d love to be wrong on that. What I’d like to see is Xbox Labs picking up exactly this sort of work and doing it properly, with the games back on sale. For now, the only way to play Forza Motorsport 5 on PC is something Xbox didn’t make and hasn’t mentioned.

Lovely shtuff lad.

Sources

• Azimuth’s own release notes and project page, dated the 26th and 27th of October 2026. Not linked, on purpose.
• Xbox Wire: Introducing Xbox Labs, the 13th of October 2026.
• Delisted Games on Forza Motorsport 6: Apex and Forza Horizon 3.